On the other hand, we must not shut our eyes to the faults of the Greek people—which were, in fact, just the faults of their ancestors made more large and more prominent by the long-continued action of circumstances favourable to their development. Will it be believed?—during the time that this heroic struggle was going on, by a people manifestly unable, even with their strongest combined exertions, to withstand their gigantic adversary—even in the mid-heat and the critical turning-point of this grapple for free existence, the Greek captains were quarrelling among themselves! There were actually at one time, as Gordon assures us, seven civil wars among a people who could only collect hundreds to plant against the thousands of their masters! Such a self-divided people, one might almost say, was unworthy of liberty. Certainly if they could not agree to fight for themselves, it did not seem the business either of France or England to force them to be patriotic. But, after all, what was this but the natural result of the geography of the country, and of the circumstances under which its latent liberty had been maintained? What was it else but the same thing, on a small scale, which the Peloponnesian war exhibited on a large scale? Division is the weak point of Greece, and always was; and as for other vices which stank so strongly in the nostrils of some of our sentimental Philhellenes—cunning, falsehood, selfishness, rapacity, and blushless impudence of all kinds—such rank weeds grow from a neglected moral soil, not only in Greece, but in the streets of London and Edinburgh, and elsewhere; the only difference being that in our case a wicked or neglectful parent brings up corrupt individuals, while in the case of the modern Greeks, a wicked and neglectful government had brought up a corrupt people. There is, no doubt, some truth in the doctrine of races and hereditary propensities; and the Greek may probably be more subtle in speculation, and more cunning in practice, than the other families of the Indo-European stock. Nevertheless, we are inclined to believe that the proverbial falsehood of the Greeks, which is the worst vice now continually thrown in their teeth, is as much the result of circumstances as of blood, and that, under the same influences, any Teutonic race whose honesty is now most loudly bepraised, would exhibit a large development of the same vice. When a people is not allowed to play the lion, it must either learn to play the fox or perish.